This paper advances a position called axiological primitivism: the philosophical claim that value is an ontological primitive, irreducible, foundational, and prior to consciousness rather than produced by it.
Against the dominant value-neutral assumption of Western modernity, the claim that reality is fundamentally indifferent to value and that value is a projection of conscious minds onto a neutral substrate, the paper argues that value is a genuine feature of reality, and that consciousness is best understood as the mode through which value encounters itself in a sufficiently receptive and calibrated system.
Axiological primitivism is not a return to pre-scientific teleology, nor a form of idealism, nor a theological claim in disguise.
